The proliferation of cloud based services and platforms continues to increase. Specifically, cloud-based content management services and platforms have impacted the way personal and corporate electronically stored information (e.g., files, images, videos, objects, etc.) are stored, and has also impacted the way such personal and corporate content is shared and managed. Such cloud-based platforms facilitate securely sharing large volumes of content among trusted collaborators on a variety of user devices such as mobile phones, tablets, laptop computers, desktop computers, and/or other devices. For example, a large enterprise with thousands of users (e.g., employees) and many terabytes of content might use a cloud-based content storage platform to efficiently and securely facilitate content access to various individual users and/or collaborative groups of users. In such cases, a user can access a large volume of objects stored in the cloud-based platform from a user device that might store merely a small portion of that volume locally. Such access can enable multiple users (e.g., collaborators) to manage certain shared objects for various collaborative purposes (e.g., co-development, audience presentation, etc.). In some cases, one enterprise might invite one or more other enterprises to collaborate on certain shared content. In such cases, the cloud-based content storage platform can implement various techniques, such as encryption, to protect the shared content as it is being accessed, managed, and/or stored by the various enterprises and/or enterprise users.
Unfortunately, legacy techniques for encrypting cloud-based shared content objects can be limited at least as pertaining to deduplication of shared content objects. Specifically, certain legacy approaches might encrypt a shared file accessed by a first enterprise with a file encryption key generated by the first enterprise to facilitate later access by the first enterprise. Another instance of the shared file might further be encrypted by a second enterprise with a second file encryption key generated by the second enterprise. In such approaches, two copies (e.g., a duplication) of the shared file might be stored on a remote file storage system. As the number of collaborating enterprises and/or collaborating enterprise users increases, so does the number of copies (e.g., duplications) of the shared file stored on the remote file storage system, resulting in an increased use of storage resources. The multiple duplications can further precipitate challenges in managing conflicts among the various instances of the shared file. In this case, additional computing resources can be required to detect and/or remediate conflicts among the multiple duplications of the shared file.
What is needed is a technique or techniques to improve over legacy and/or over other considered approaches. Some of the approaches described in this background section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.